Antwerpen, Bonheiden, Brussel, Gent and Leuven, Belgium, February 1st, 2022. A team of three Flemish technology and services companies and three research groups have started working on the APAX project. A two-year project, Automated Posture Analysis that Scales (APAX) will investigate the risks related to the digital presence of online assets in an automated manner that can adapt itself to the requirements of hyper scaling. The goal of the project is to achieve a higher level of cybersecurity and avoid negative impact from vulnerabilities such as Log4J by maximising the usage of automated processes.

Industry project partners Awingu, Ceeyu and Toreon will join forces to research, explore and build technologies thanks to a cybersecurity funding initiative from VLAIO, the Flemish government agency for innovation and entrepreneurship. The three companies will apply ongoing research and inspire academics for future work to help automate the analysis of threats and challenges in cybersecurity. They will do so using the expertise from research partners VUB Software Languages Lab and VUB Artificial Intelligence Lab, together with industry association LSEC.

Limited resources

With the ongoing digitalization and continuous evolving cloud, internet technologies and applications running on them, new cybersecurity challenges appear while many older ones have not yet been resolved. The recent Log4J vulnerability that started early December 2021 continues to ripple throughout 2022 and will likely last for months or even years to come. The vulnerability kept cybersecurity teams busy during the end-of-year holiday period. All systems and applications needed to be inspected and analysed for potential business risks that needed mitigation. Most organizations identified this as a labour-intensive activity, eating away their limited resources. They realised that an automated approach to protection, is a better way to go.

Maximize automation

The fundamental goal of the APAX project is to avoid malicious activities to happen and to avoid active business systems and applications from being inaccessible, infringed, unreliable, held hostage or being abused to trade illicit content. To keep up with these challenges and evolutions, cybersecurity will need to evolve from a manual, labour-intensive approach to automated prevention, detection, mitigation, reaction, incident handling, process management, reporting, analysis, and recovery. This must, of course, happen in close collaboration with the operating parties, supporting businesses, people, and processes.

Increase efficiency

The APAX project partners will work on improving minimally 50 partially automated assessments for cybersecurity postures. Further automation will increase the efficiency of cybersecurity experts and halve the time spent on each individual case. Maximizing automation decreases the cybersecurity reaction time and reduces the repetitive work of security specialists, allowing them to focus on their expert work.

The Municipality of Avezzano is a small town in the province of L’Aquila (Abruzzo) and its territory extends over 100 square kilometers. It is made up of the main town and some hamlets and has more than 40.000 inhabitants. The IT service of the municipality consists of 4 people, who directly provide support and maintain the infrastructure for the approximately 200 employees equipped with IT tools.

During the 2020 pandemic lockdown, the municipality’s ICT service faced the challenge of “smart working” in order to allow their employees to continue in their valuable work of service to citizens and institutions. The classic equipment of municipal employees were desktop devices, posing an additional challenge to the Municipality’s ITC team: since it was not possible to equip each employee with a laptop, they were looking for a way to allow connections from the outside via the employees’ personal devices. The challenge was especially daunting considering the heavy security requirements an institution such as Avezzano has to adhere to.

Connecting to desktops in the municipal office

Dublin, Ireland, 19^th January 2022 – Similarly to other leaders across the globe, the Irish government recommend working from home to fight the spread of COVID-19. Many organisations have already shifted to a more permanent remote working approach, with a recent survey showing more than 90% of Irish executives have hired, or plan to hire people to develop their remote work policy. But with cyber-attacks continuing to rise, how can organisations ensure their remote assets are adequately protected?

Too often, many are still relying on the use of a VPN (Virtual Private Network), but these lack the granular controls needed to allocate users with specific rights and should never be relied upon as a single solution to enable remote working. To provide secure remote access, a flexible solution that can be scaled up or down when required is essential.

Awingu is a leading provider of secure remote access technology that has been recognised by Gartner as a ‘Cool Vendor in Unified Workspaces’. Organisations of all sizes can use Awingu as a cost-effective and simple workplace solution that, unlike other providers, does not require agents or software to be installed on end-user devices. Awingu runs entirely in the browser, where it combines existing applications into one online workspace without hassle, including SaaS and “legacy” Windows or Linux applications.